How Fowlie Made the Money He Invested in Pavones
By Karl Block
The rumor that Danny “Mack” Fowlie bought and developed Pavones with “ill-gotten” drug profits, a rumor popularized by
Allan Weisbecker,i has gained widespread circulation despite its irrationality. Fowlie has always had money. He inherited a great deal from his multi-millionaire father, also named Daniel Fowlie, who (after WWII) created Executive Transport Corporation by buying several airfields and their planes, converting the aircrafts into executive planes, and selling them to corporations and airlines. Dan Senior sold Braniff Airlines their very first twenty-one DC3s. When Dan Senior died in 1949 (when Danny still was a teenager), Danny invested part the inherited money offshore and into lucrative California real-estate deals. At age sixteen, Danny bought property in La Jolla, and after he got back from the Korean War in 1954 (at age twenty-one), he subdivided the property, sold the first lot for more than he had paid for the entire property, and profited hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Dan's Father
Fowlie also had a very lucrative career diving for abalone and trapping lobster. By sports diving as a boy in Pacific Beach and La Jolla and selling his catches to local restaurants, “[a]t age thirteen (1946) Dan bought his own car, although cars were still rare just after WWII (1939-1945).”ii At age seventeen, Fowlie began diving commercially in Santa Barbara and selling his catches to the Pierce brothers, some of the biggest abalone processors on the West Coast at the time. Fowlie dove with four men on the Commander, and the crew sold their abalone for five-to-six dollars a dozen (today abalone sells for about eighty dollars a dozen). Earning up to six hundred dollars a day on those occasional hundred-dozen days, Fowlie recalls the glory he experienced when he and the Pierce Fisheries' other two boats outproduced the entire Black Fleet (comprised of over fifteen boats) in the late fifties. Pierce Fisheries became fishing legends that season.
Dan with over 3,000 pounds of big lobster
Fowlie’s Leather Gypsy Inc., however, brought Fowlie some of his greatest financial success. Fowlie’s business grossed millions each year selling leather handbags and clothing to over three thousand stores and high-end boutiques nationally and abroad—including stores like Macy’s, Nordstrom, Saks Fifth Avenue, and JC Penney. Fowlie then invested much of his profits into buying and developing Pavones, Costa Rica. He also bought fugitive financier Robert Vesco’s house in San Jose when Vesco was ousted from Costa Rica; Fowlie then sold the estate for millions of profit and reinvested that money into Pavones as well.
In fact, the Costa Rican government clearly recognizes that Fowlie acquired all of his property in Pavones apart from and long before his marijuana-conspiracy charges in 1985, charges leveled against Fowlie eleven years after Fowlie began developing Pavones. Had the government found any link between Fowlie’s land purchases and these charges, it would have confiscated all of Fowlie’s property in Pavones.
i. Weisbecker, Allan. “The Investigation.” [Internet]. [Cited 1 February 2008]. Available at <http://www.banditobooks.com/ezine/investigation-begins>.
ii. Jenkins, Dylan. “Allan Weisbecker, Can’t You Get along with Anyone?” The Facts about Dan Fowlie and Pavones. [Internet]. [Cited 21 April 2008]. Available at < http://www.thefactsaboutdanfowlieandpavones.com/Articles/Allan_Weisbecker_Can_t.html>.